CHAPTER 109 —
PAST AND FUTURE HISTORY OF THE WORLD EUTHANASIA MOVEMENT

American Life League

Life is not a quality; death is not a right, and it is not
realistic to expect that euthanasia will remain voluntary. Euthanasia
doctors will kill you with your consent if they can get it; and
without your consent if they cannot. Euthanasia is not a right. It is
the abolition of all rights.

Dutch doctor I. van der Sluis.[1]

Anti-Life Philosophy.

WHEREAS, there is nothing more fundamental to American women than
freedom of choice, and the U.S. Supreme Court, in Cruzan, has now
established that there is a right to choose to die ... THEREFORE, BE
IT RESOLVED, that the National Organization for Women affirms that the
right to make appropriate and legal choices about dying is a feminist
issue.

National Organization for Women (NOW)
resolution of July 1991 entitled "The Right to Choose to Die A
Feminist Issue."

It can't happen here. What happened in Nazi Germany can't happen here
because the United States is an enlightened society. Our democracy has
built-in safeguards that guarantee that its citizens have full
protection under the law.

Anti-choice people apparently believe that, just because we have
reproductive freedom, we will one day slide down the "slippery
slope" to "euthanasia on demand," followed by
"euthanasia on command."

How ridiculous! This cannot happen, just as forced abortions cannot
happen.

Introduction.

The only thing that mankind learns from history is that mankind
does not learn from history.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the
"Father of Utilitarianism."

Tried and True Anti-Life Strategies.

Many of the members of the pro-euthanasia movement are veterans of
the pro-abortion movement. Therefore, they are very experienced in the
use of the standard anti-life strategies and tactics, including
propaganda and media manipulation, that are described in Chapters 6
through 19 of Volume I.

The pro-euthanasiasts know what works to advance their cause. Since
many or most of the most experienced euthanasiasts endured their
"trial by fire" when pushing abortion, it is many times
possible to simply substitute the word "EUTHANASIA" for
"ABORTION" in their literature, as evidenced by reading the
NOW quote shown at the beginning of this chapter.

As described in Chapter 16 of Volume I, pro-abortionists in the
mid-1960s discovered that slogans were their most powerful weapons
during the fight for prenatal genocide. A catchy slogan allows a person
to buy into an entire philosophy without first having to think about it
in detail, and is therefore a great boon to those people who are trying
to reach masses of lazy and undisciplined minds.

The pro-death people have now slightly altered their 'sound bites' to
accommodate their drive to kill born human beings.

The euthanasiasts talk of "victims" who are being
"oppressed" by "vindictive and inhumane laws." They
speak eloquently of "self-determination," the "freedom to
choose," and the "right to control one's own body." And
they speak of euthanasia as "an agonizing decision." This last
slogan was echoed by Dutch euthanasia doctor Herbert Cohen when
confronted by anti-euthanasia physicians who contended that the killing
of sick people would lead to a cheapening of human life. Cohen claimed
that "That [argument] implies that doctors think it is an easy
solution to apply euthanasia. Well, it's absolutely not."[2]

This use of these slogans by euthanasiasts is particularly worrisome
because they are so effective. The euthanasia movement in the United
States is following precisely the same path that the
eugenics/euthanasia movement did in Nazi Germany. It is also treading
the same road followed by the flourishing Dutch euthanasia industry.

We need only examine the historical experiences of these two
countries to find out what the future of euthanasia will be in the
United States.

Here We Go Again!

It is not necessary to make vague statements or insupportable
comparisons between the German and Dutch 'experiences' of euthanasia and
the one that we are currently undergoing in the United States.

Figure 109-1 merely lists the dates and progression of the euthanasia
movement in both the United States and Nazi Germany and allows the
reader to judge for himself.

FIGURE 109-1
PARALLEL QUOTES AND ACTIONS OF NAZI AND AMERICAN EUTHANASIASTS

1895: "If it is now pointed out
that
1972: "It is a wild contention that
the Jew is human, I then reject
that
newborn babies are persons."
totally."
Dr. Michael Tooley.
The German Reichschancellor,
before the assembled Reichstag.

"What good does it do to humanity to
"Most birth defects are not discovered
maintain artificially and rear the thousands
until
birth. If a child were not declared
of cripples, deaf-mutes and idiots? Is it not
alive until three days after birth, the
better and more
doctor could allow the
rational to cut off from the first this unavoidable child
to die if the parents so chose and
misery which their poor lives will bring them-
save a lot of misery and suffering.
selves and their families?"
I believe this view is the only rational,
Nazi 'ethicist' Dr. Ernst Haeckel, 1904.
compassionate attitude to
have."
American 'ethicist' Dr. James
Watson, 1973.

1920: Alfred Hoche and Judge Karl 1931:
Margaret Sanger, in her book Binding Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Pivot
of Civilization, wrote that
Lebensunwerten Leben ("The "[Philanthropists]
encourage the Permission to Destroy Life healthier
and more normal sections of
Unworthy of Life"), which recom- the
world to shoulder the burden
mended the active euthanasia of of
the unthinking and indiscriminate
"absolutely worthless human beings,"
fecundity of others; which brings
including the retarded, the deformed,
with it, as I think the reader must
and the feebleminded and senile. The
agree, a dead weight of human
book referred to eugenic murder
waste. Instead of decreasing and
as "a healing work," and "an allow-
aiming to eliminate the stocks that are
able, useful act." Frederick Wertham,
most detrimental to the world, it tends
author of A Sign for Cain, wrote
to render them to a menacing degree
that "This little book influenced, or at
dominant."
least crystallized, the thinking of a
whole generation."

1931: Physicians and psychiatrists
1926: "There is only one reply to a
begin to discuss means of mass
request for a higher birthrate among
sterilization and/or killing of mental
the intelligent, and that is to ask the
patients while meeting at professional
government to first take the burden of
conventions.
the insane and feeble-minded from
off your back. [Mandatory] sterilization
for these is the answer."
Margaret Sanger, Birth Control
Review, October 1926.

1933: 'Lifeboat exercises' are introduced
to 1965: 'Lifeboat
exercises' are
propagandize school children into
accepting
introduced into the public schools
killing of the "useless." For example,
Problem for the purpose of propagandizing
95 of Alfred Dorner's mathematics
text
school children into accepting theMathematik inDiensteder National-
killing of the "useless." For example,
politischen Erziehung asks,
"The
one question from a Shippensport,
construction of an insane asylum
requires
Pennsylvania text asks, "A new country
six million Reichsmarks (RM). How
many is
being formed because the problem
new housing units at 15,000 RM
each
of overpopulation has completely could have been built for this
sum?"
destroyed your former country. Select
below. The remaining 18 will
die
any eight persons out of the list of 26
of starvation. Give reasons for your
selections."

1933: Selective forced abortions
1907: Indiana
becomes the first of 28
and the mass sterilization of those
states to pass a
mandatory sterilization
with "serious hereditary diseases"
law aimed at those considered "unfit."
begins.
58
years later, the selective forced
abortions and mass sterilization
programs
aimed at Puerto Rican
and Native America women are
still being carried out.

"The enormous costs imposed on
"Institutional care for Down Syndrome
our society by congenital defects
alone represents an
expense of
is calculated to be 1.2 billion
$250-350 million per
year."
Reichsmarks annually."
National Academy of Sciences,
Dr. Gerhard Wagner, 1935.
1975.

1935: Hitler convenes high-level
1967: Euthanasia
societies begin to
conferences to discuss the possibility
hold high-level conferences
for the
of establishing programs for liquidating
purpose of discussing the liquidation
the "incurably ill."
of
"human vegetables" and the
"incurably ill elderly."

1935: On May 10, the first large-scale
1987: The first
large-scale murders
murders of helpless people by the
of helpless people by American
Nazi regime occurred when twelve
euthanasiasts occurred when eight
mental patients were euthanized at
elderly
persons were starved to death
Hadamar,
Germany.
at a nursing home in Galveston, Texas.

1936: "Jews living in Germany are
not
1973. "The vegetable patient is
'persons' in the legal
sense."
dead, a nonperson."
German Supreme Court, April 2,
1936.
'Ethicist' Joseph Fletcher.

1938: Leipzig. Baby boy Knauer is born blind
1982: Bloomington,
Indiana. Baby
and missing part of one arm and one leg. He is
Doe is born with an esophagal
defect
the ideal test case for Germany's euthanasia/
and spina bifida. He is the ideal test
eugenics program. Hitler's personal physician,
case for America's euthanasia/
Karl Brandt, murdered the child. The eugenicists eugenics program.
The baby was
carefully observed the reaction of the judicial
allowed to die of thirst and
starvation.
system and the press to this murder.
The eugenicists carefully observed the
It was positive.
reactions of the judicial system and
the press to this murder.
It was positive.

1941: Goebbel's propaganda film Ich
1987: ABC releases its propagandaKlage An ("I Accuse") is released.
This
film "When the Time Comes." This
"docudrama" portrayed a woman
suffering
"docudrama" portrayed a woman
from multiple sclerosis who is
'mercifully'
suffering from cancer who is
euthanized by her loving husband to
the
'mercifully' euthanized by her loving
accompaniment of soft, soothing
piano
husband to the accompaniment of
music.
soft, soothing piano music.

Reference: Most of these events and quotes
are described in William Brennan. The Abortion Holocaust: Today's
Final Solution. Order from Landmark Press, Post Office Box 13547,
1461 Dunn Road, St. Louis, Missouri 63138, or Life Issues Bookshelf, Sun
Life, Thaxton, Virginia 24174, telephone: (703) 586-4898. 1983, 237
pages.

This chapter also includes a detailed description of the current
Dutch euthanasia situation and concludes with a description of some of
the pivotal events regarding "mercy killing" in the United
States.

The Paramount Lesson.

There is one lesson that must be learned from the German
euthanasia experience. It is pivotal. It is absolutely basic. It is that

ALL EUTHANASIA BEGINS WITH AN 'INFINITELY SMALL, WEDGED-IN LEVER.'

This phrase was originated by Dr. Leo Alexander, instructor in
psychiatry at Tufts College Medical College, who served as a consultant
to the Secretary of War and was on the staff of the Chief Counsel for
War Crimes at Nuremberg. He said that

Whatever proportions these crimes finally assumed, it became
evident to all who investigated that they had started from small
beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in
emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the
acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that
there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived.

This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the
severely and chronically sick. Gradually, the sphere of those to be
included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially
unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and,
finally, all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the
infinitely small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind
received its emphasis was the attitude toward the nonrehabilitable
sick.[3]

The remainder of this chapter traces the progress of the American and
Dutch euthanasia programs. Although the sequence of events in the United
States is not precisely the same as that of Nazi Germany or Holland, it
is obvious from these events that we have already traveled far down the
road to "euthanasia on command."

Dark Beginnings.

Introduction.

Lawmakers and judges usually position themselves at the forefront of
any major movement for social change.

However, the euthanasia movements seem to be different. Doctors,
not politicians, have always been in the vanguard of the push for the
killing of human beings.

Das Recht Auf Den Tod.

Direct euthanasia is certainly nothing new. It has been discussed in
writings of great antiquity, some of which are thousands of years old.

One of the first modern-day references to utilitarian or 'economic'
euthanasia in Western literature can be found in the 1877 work Lebenswunder
of the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Heinrich Haeckel;
"What a tremendous sum of pain and grief ... what losses of
property, private and public, could be spared, if only people would
decide at last to release the absolutely incurable from their
unspeakable ills with a dose of morphine."

In 1895, Dr. Adolf Jost published his book Das Recht Auf den Tod
("The Right to Die"). He outlined for the first time the
"slippery slope" theory as applied to euthanasia; "Of
course, at first, strict limitations must be respected. For example, the
right to die of lunatics will only come into consideration later,
because consent of the patient is of course lacking, and this
circumstance could easily, at least at the beginning of reform, be a
disadvantage."

The First Euthanasia Society.

Dr. Killick Millard founded the first euthanasia society in the
world, the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalization Society of London, in
October of 1935. He was also the first modern-day doctor to push for
involuntary euthanasia of the incurably ill.

Charles E. Nixdorff, treasurer of the Society, restated Dr. Jost's
"slippery slope" theory when he wrote in the January 27, 1939 New
York Times that the Society's proposals were limited only to
voluntary euthanasia at first. However, when the public mood
inevitably became more "liberal" about such affairs, the
Society would then move to establish the means for the widespread
killing of what the Society referred to as "useless persons."

After the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, various authors referred to
this "Eichmann Effect," where a person "... is willing to
commit atrocities he would not normally commit when he sees himself as
merely an instrument of some higher authority."[4]

This effect occurs when physicians deceive themselves into thinking
that they are merely doing the will of society by eliminating those who
are a "burden" to it.

The Evolution of
Euthanasia in the United States.

If subjects are needed to render accurate knowledge about the
workings of the human mechanism, there is an endless supply. Take the
extreme elderly, the senile, use the criminally insane, rapists and
murderers. They are largely useless and doomed anyway.

Professor Ron Westover in 1985.[5]

Introduction.

The euthanasia situation in the United States is far more serious
than most people realize, and can be summarized by examining the various
court decisions that have progressively and relentlessly expanded the
"right to die" and the "right to be killed."

The most important euthanasia court cases that have been decided to
date are described in Chapter 107.

The 1986 Bloomington, Indiana "Baby Doe" case riveted
national attention on the problem of infanticide in this country.
Infanticide, however, is nothing new to American hospitals. As long ago
as 1965, children with spina bifida and Down Syndrome and who were
otherwise healthy were slowly and quietly starved to death.[6] There
were also numerous cases of the involuntary euthanasia of sick adults
who could still "think, see, speak and hear."[6]

Parallels With Nazi Germany.

Figure 109-1 shows how closely the American medical profession is
following the lead of the Nazi "doctors."

The primary lesson we must learn from these progressions is that a
certain utilitarian attitude towards human life will lead to a definite
progression in euthanasia that is all but set in concrete. Thus, it is
no surprise that many of the Nazi and American quotes shown in Figure
109-1 are almost identical.

Anti-Semitism flourished simultaneously in both the American and Nazi
euthanasia movements. In the mid-1930s, the pathologically anti-Semitic
American Madison Grant argued that "sentimental beliefs" (such
as Christianity) short-circuited the practice of infanticide, which he
saw as a natural weeding-out process necessary to the "preservation
of the [human] species."[7]

Charles Davenport, another prominent American eugenicist, asserted
that "Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into
Rhode Island, but we have no place to drive the Jews to. Also, they
burned the witches, but it seems to be against the mores to burn any
considerable part of our population."[7]

Meanwhile, leaders of the Nazi eugenics/ euthanasia movement held
that Jews and others not of Aryan quality "... had to be treated
like tuberculosis bacilli, with which a healthy body may become
infested. This was not cruel, if one remembers that even innocent
creatures of nature, such as hares and deer, have to be killed, so that
no harm is caused by them."[8]

The Nazis were deeply interested in euthanasia for eugenics and for
economics. So are many Americans. For example, State Representative
Walter W. Sackett Jr., M.D., proposed a euthanasia bill for
consideration by the 1972 session of the Florida legislature. This bill
was a concrete expression of Dr. Sackett's concern that the State of
Florida was spending far too much money on the ill, especially Down
Syndrome children. As Dr. Sackett stated, "Five billion dollars
could be saved in the next half-century if the State's mongoloids were
permitted merely to succumb to pneumonia a disease to which they are
highly susceptible."

Another primary concern of the Nazis was euthanasia for the purpose
of expanding Lebensraum "living space." Many American
doctors also share this concern. For example, Dr. Robert H. Williams of
the University of Washington Medical School says that "Planning to
prevent overpopulation of the earth must include euthanasia, either
negative or positive."[9]

And Edgar R. Chasteen, in his ominously-named book The Case for
Compulsory Birth Control, stated darkly that "Soon the world
may well be engulfed by indescribable horrors as these nations of the
starving are crushed under the weight of their teeming
populations."[10]

The Nazis did not want the bodies of their victims to go to waste,
and so they salvaged their organs for the purposes of medical research.
American doctors are now proposing a "dissent form" approach
to organ donation. These laws allow doctors to ransack any or all of the
organs of those people who have not indicated a contrary wish in
"Living Wills" or other legally-binding documents. The
implications of this type of approach for medical experimentation are
obvious. What euthanasia 'doctor' could resist the opportunity to remove
organs from a victim scheduled to die at a particular time?

In 1988, Nevada became the first State to adopt this "dissent
form" approach to organ donations. As described below, this is also
the situation in Holland.

Nazi and American euthanasiasts inevitably share even the same
language. By the end of World War II, a quarter of a million people had
been exterminated under the euphemisms Den Recht Auf den Tod
("the right to die"), Todhilfe ("aid in
dying"), and Gnadentod ("good [dignified] death")
the exact words used by the Hemlock Society and other
pro-euthanasia groups today.[11]

Yet More (Yawn) Dissenters.

One of the most powerful weapons used by the anti-life media cartel
in the United States is the exploitation of so-called
"dissenters" who publicly repudiate and undermine the pro-life
philosophies of their parent organizations in particular, the Catholic
Church. This strategy has been employed in the past to disarm or
discredit the most powerful potential foes of abortion, and it is
working just as well for the euthanasia pushers.

Predictably, just as happened with artificial contraception and
abortion, much-publicized dissenters have "boldly and
courageously" stepped forth to combat the "hierarchical
church's rigidity in matters of personal choice." These include
Father Kevin O'Rourke of the Center for Health Care Ethics, who filed a
friend of the court brief urging the starvation death of Nancy Cruzan.
Other "dissenters" include the Catholic Health Association,
which regularly advocates the withdrawal of even food and water in its
ironically-named magazine Health Progress.[12]

This is in direct defiance of the Vatican's 1980 Declaration on
Euthanasia; "It is necessary to state firmly once more that
nothing and no one can in any way permit the killing of an innocent
human being, whether a fetus or an embryo, an infant or an adult, an old
person, or one suffering from an incurable disease, or a person who is
dying. Furthermore, no one is permitted to ask for this act of killing,
either for himself or herself or for another person entrusted to his or
her care, nor can he or she consent to it, either explicitly or
implicitly. Nor can any authority legitimately recommend or permit such
an action."

Euthanasia: How It Will
Be.

You are a member of the first generation of doctors in the history
of medicine to turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill
millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed
children, for the good of mankind and to do so without a single murmur
from the august New England Journal of Medicine. And do you know what
you're going to end up doing? You, a graduate of Harvard and a reader
of the New York Times and a member of the Ford Foundation's Program
for the Third World? Do you know what is going to happen to you?

You're going to end up killing Jews.

Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome.[13]

Two Predictors and Two Deaths.

History has given us two predictors of the future progress of
euthanasia in the United States. It has also benchmarked the progress of
the movement in our country with the tragic deaths of two women.

The first predictor is that we can say in general that the overall
strategy of the euthanasia movement in our country almost exactly
parallels that of the pro-abortion movement, but trails it by about
twenty years. These parallels are illustrated in figures contained in
Chapter 112, "Euthanasia Objectives."

And the second predictor is provided by Holland. We can look to the
example the Dutch are setting for us. We are now proceeding along the
very same road in the very same manner that the Dutch did but we are
trailing them by about ten years.

Two women Janet Adkins and Nancy Cruzan have firmly defined for us
the current status of euthanasia in this country. After these shocking
deaths, many people outside the pro-euthanasia movement wondered where
we were headed.

The euthanasiasts know, but they aren't telling.

It is instructive to examine the situation in a country where
euthanasia is a fact of life in order to ask ourselves the question: Do
we really want this for our country?

For the answer, we need look no further than Holland, whose
permissive euthanasia laws have come under increasing scrutiny over the
last five years.

A Matter of Mere Economics ...

Being elderly and ill in Holland is a frightening experience, because
the elderly know that they are officially "expendable." They
are expendable because the primary motivation for Dutch health 'care' is
not care per se, but cost containment.

This is the most inhuman legacy of the menace called 'socialized
medicine.'

Consider the predicament of a 60-year old Dutch person who simply
cannot avoid seeking medical care in a hospital. He or she is acutely
aware of the following facts.

Dutch Doctors Have a License to Kill.

Every Dutch doctor has received formal "how-to" euthanasia
training in medical school.[14] The Royal Dutch Society of Pharmacology
(KNMP) has issued a "how-to" euthanasia book to every doctor.
This book contains recipes for undetectable poisons that can be placed
in food or injected in such a manner that they are almost impossible to
detect during an autopsy.[15]

The exact cost of each line of treatment for every common illness or
injury is known beforehand and written up on charts for easy reference
and analysis in each individual case.[16] Therefore, based on the
information contained in these charts, general practitioners have been
instructed by their hospitals to give involuntary lethal
injections to those elderly patients whose care is deemed "too
expensive."[17]

There is an 80 percent chance that any individual Dutch doctor has
killed someone deliberately through direct or active (not
passive) euthanasia.[18] And a 1991 government survey found that only
one in 10 Dutch physicians would refuse a request for euthanasia.[2]

As in the United States, the real motivation for most Dutch
euthanasias is not to alleviate the pain of the patients but to enhance
the convenience of the doctors and the families of the ill. Dr. Pieter
Michels, director of a Dutch hospital for terminal patients, said that
only nine of three thousand dying people passing through his hospital
asked for euthanasia over twenty years, and most of these requests came
about because of pressure from their families. One doctor admitted to
killing people because the sight of their suffering upset him.[19]

As leading Dutch euthanasiast Dr. Pieter Admiraal asserted at the 8th
biennial conference of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies,
"Every patient has the right to judge his suffering as unbearable
and the right to ask his physician for euthanasia. Pain is very seldom a
reason for euthanasia."[20]

As with abortionists, the physicians have to inure themselves to the
thought of killing human beings. Dr. Cornelius van der Meer said of his
euthanasias that "You have to conquer something in yourself to do
it. It's not a natural act."[19]

Dutch doctor-killers are advised to not drive alone to the
"procedures," and to seek counseling before and after their
killings from psychologists who specialize in treating doctors who
regularly commit euthanasia.[19]

How it is Now: The New Abortionists.

Dutch doctor Herbert Cohen recently described in detail how he kills
his patients. It is interesting to note his attention to aesthetic
detail, and it is also significant that he is only one of scores of
Dutch doctors who still make house visits not to heal but to kill.

Cohen appears on the front doorstep of the "chosen" with a
beautiful bouquet of flowers. He chats amiably with the family to put
them at ease, and then approaches his victim, whom he injects first with
a sleeping agent and then with the fatal paralyzing agent curare. Cohen
is punctual: "If the appointment is for 8 o'clock, I'm there at
7:55, the patients is asleep by 8 and dead by 8:10." Then he calls
the police and informs them that a euthanasia has taken place, and a
medical examiner is sent to the house.[21]

Although he has followed this procedure dozens of times, he has never
been prosecuted.

"Living Wills" Mean Nothing.

Patient statements regarding a desire to live or a desire to receive
certain treatments in documents similar in nature to American
"Living Wills" and Durable Powers of Attorney (DPAs) mean
nothing in the Netherlands.

Euthanasia is often performed involuntarily on patients who
have chronic diabetes, rheumatism, multiple sclerosis, AIDS, bronchitis,
and upon older accident victims, no matter what the prognosis.[17,18]
Many Dutch citizens, in self-defense, are now carrying a
"Declaration of a Will To Live" (issued by the aptly-named
Sanctuary Society, or Schuilplaats, and The Hiding Place
Foundation), which states that they do not want to be euthanized
without their knowledge. Predictably, these Declarations carry very
little weight with the same doctors who introduced and then ignored the
so-called "Living Wills."

Dutch cardiologist Richard Fenigsen notes that "The burden of
justifying his existence is now placed upon the patient."[22] And
Dutch attorney General T.M. Schalken said in 1984 that "... elderly
people begin to consider themselves a burden to the society, and feel
under an obligation to start conversations on euthanasia, or even to
request it."[23]

Patients are Pressured.

If a person sixty years of age or older cannot avoid entering a Dutch
hospital, euthanasia will be suggested repeatedly to him, even if he has
not asked for it, and even if he is suffering from only a minor
illness.[24]

All of this leads to a chronic and unquenchable fear among the Dutch
elderly that they will be put to death if they encounter health
professionals in any capacity. A comprehensive 1987 poll showed that 68
percent of all Dutch elderly feared that they would be killed without
their consent or even their knowledge.[25] And 93 percent of
those living in the few remaining Dutch nursing homes are "strongly
opposed" to euthanasia and for good reason!

Yet another survey showed that the majority of the elderly in Dutch
nursing homes will only drink water from faucets and will touch no other
liquid, because they believe that their orange juice or milk may be
spiked with deadly poison.[26]

This phenomenon is certainly not restricted to the nation of Holland.
The sick elderly deeply distrust the medical establishment in every
country that has come under the regime of socialized medicine. In
England, Richard Lamerton, Medical Director of the Hospice of the
Marches, Hereford and Cheltenham, says that "Every time euthanasia
was discussed on television I had old people in my general practice
refusing admission to hospital for fear of being 'put down.' And the
fear that I was gently poisoning them stopped some of my dying patients
from taking their pain drugs."[27]

The number of nursing homes in Holland has decreased by more than 80
percent in the last 20 years, and the life expectancy of the few elderly
who remain in such homes is becoming shorter all the time. In some
cases, it can be measured in hours.[22]

Involuntary euthanasia is administered to even non-terminally ill
patients in Dutch nursing homes, including those with multiple
sclerosis, blindness, or those who require intensive home care.[28]
Involuntary euthanasia is also administered to accident victims and
those people with rheumatism, diabetes, AIDS, and bronchitis.[29]

Even young children are not safe from the "new
abortionists." On October 9, 1987, doctor P.A. Voute told the daily
newspaper Het Parool that he had given a poison pill to a 14-year
old boy. He also claimed that, since 1980, he had given poison pills to
many teenagers who have suffered from cancer, even when the disease was
nonterminal.[30]

No Prosecution for Mass Killings.

It is a primary strategy of the anti-life movements to simply ignore
laws that members do not like, and to completely disregard moral rules
that they consider "inconvenient." After all, when one commits
the ultimate crime (killing) and gets away scot-free, what other laws
can possibly be of consequence?

Pro-abortionists in the United States helped about 200,000 women
annually receive illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade.
Infanticide of handicapped newborns is practiced widely and routinely in
our neonatal intensive care units without fear of prosecution, despite
the fact that such killing is blatantly illegal.

And Derek Humphry, founder and president of the Hemlock Society,
killed his first wife and got away scot-free.

The logic behind these murders is solid. If a law is ignored widely
enough even laws against killing the law becomes a joke, people
get used to the idea, and everyone can break the law with impunity. As
Alan Guttmacher, former Medical Director of the Planned Parenthood
Federation of America claims, "A law which good citizens contrive
to fracture, and usually without penalty, is a bad law."[31]

In Holland, serial killers practice "medicide" on a wide
scale, despite the fact that it is technically illegal.

The precedent was set in April of 1973, when a Leeuwarden doctor was
tried for killing her 78-year old mother who was lodged in a nursing
home. The doctor was found guilty of murder but was sentenced to exactly
one week in jail (suspended).

The presiding judge stated that the Court accepted euthanasia under
certain conditions: The disease had to be incurable, the suffering
unbearable, the patient terminal, and the killing would have to be
requested by the patient. There was no appeal to a higher court, so this
decision established a firm precedent. The virulently pro-euthanasia
press hailed the Court's decision as "wise, compassionate, and
merciful."

Just a few days after this trial, the Dutch Voluntary Euthanasia
Society was founded. It grew explosively, and in 1978, 20 of the 150
members of Parliament attended its annual meeting. By 1980, there was a
large Parliamentary majority favoring the legalization of euthanasia.

The following examples show how meaningless even the most
carefully-written "laws with exceptions" truly are, because
anti-lifers all over the world simply ignore rules that do not suit
them, and carry on regardless.

• A doctor embarked on a crusade to "clean out" DeTerp
Nursing Home and killed 20 residents without their consent or
knowledge. He was charged with five murders pleaded guilty and
was cleared of all counts by a Dutch court during his trial. He was
even presented with an award of $150,000 for "having his name
maligned!"[32]

• Four nurses at an Amsterdam hospital admitted to killing
numerous unconscious patients by injecting them with fatal doses of
insulin without their consent or knowledge. The "nurses"
were wholeheartedly supported by the hospital's employee council,
which called the murders of the patients excusable by dint of
"humane considerations." The district courts agreed with
this reasoning, and no charges were lodged against the nurses. In a
subsequent sickening media propaganda piece, the children of the
victims hugged the nurses and thanked them.[32]

• Several doctors directly killed 21 men and women at a nursing
home in the Hague in the Spring of 1985. One doctor admitted to
killing six of the patients without asking their consent, but he was
not even charged with a crime. He stated that he based his actions on
vague statements from patients like "I don't want to become a
vegetable," made as early as four years previously.[1] This is a
fine example of how euthanasiasts will seize upon any splinter of
"evidence" to kill even undocumented statements that may or
may not have even been made. The same psychology is evident in
abortionists who commit all of their thousands of killings for the
"health" of the mother.

• On November 4, 1983, Dr. Pieter Admiraal killed a young woman
suffering from multiple sclerosis by the same method used by Dr. Jack
Kevorkian to kill his first victim, Janet Adkins; the first injection
was a powerful sedative, and the second was a killing poison. He was
tried and acquitted of all charges. The Dutch Euthanasia Society had
published his "how-to" euthanasia manual in 1977. This
manual is presented to every doctor in Holland, and has also been
translated into English and shipped to the United States.

These examples give vivid support to the statement by Dutch doctor I.
van der Sluis that "Life is not a quality; death is not a right,
and it is not realistic to expect that euthanasia will remain voluntary.
Euthanasia doctors will kill you with your consent if they can get it;
and without your consent if they cannot. Euthanasia is not a right. It
is the abolition of all rights."[1]

Dutch euthanasia proponent Dr. Julius Hackethal confirmed Dr. van der
Sluis' fears that not only are flagrant abuses inevitable under the
current legal system in the Netherlands, they are happening right now
on a wide scale; "I know based on my 40 years of experience in 5
hospitals 12 years I spent in university hospitals that killing by
applying death shots to a hopelessly ill patient against his will or at
least without his definite wish, happens much more often than is made
public."[33]

What on Earth Happened?

Many people were deeply impressed by the example set by the Dutch
medical profession during the early stages of World War II.

In 1941, Artur Seyss-Inquart, the Reich Commissar for the
Netherlands, ordered Dutch physicians to participate in the Nazi
selection and extermination projects. The Dutch doctors unanimously
refused. Seyss-Inquart then threatened to pull their medical licenses,
and the doctors mailed them to him, continuing their practices in
secret. Seyss-Inquart finally seized a hundred of the doctors and
shipped them off to concentration camps, but the remainder still
unanimously refused to cooperate in the Nazi genocide.

Things have turned completely around in the last fifty years. Today
it is the German physicians who are strongly rejecting euthanasia
while their Dutch colleagues embrace it.

Why are Dutch physicians so enthusiastically killing their most
helpless patients just fifty years after defending them with their very
lives?

The answer lies in the power of propaganda and is a testimony to the
extraordinary influence of the media in a modern society.

Dutch citizens have been subjected to an intense pro-euthanasia
propaganda barrage through all of their media outlets for more than
twenty years. The Dutch doctors initially resisted and spoke out against
the media, but prominent anti-euthanasia physicians were destroyed by
the press. Eventually, the resistance of anti-euthanasia doctors was
officially punished and suppressed.

This media bombardment has affected the Dutch public most profoundly.
76 percent of the Dutch public support voluntary euthanasia, which is
supposedly the ultimate in "freedom of choice," but,
paradoxically, 77 percent also support involuntary active
euthanasia, which is the denial of freedom of choice. And fully
90 percent of university economics students support the compulsory
(forced) euthanasia of groups of people deemed to be a "burden to
society" for the purpose of "streamlining the
economy."[23]

Dr. Hackethal revealed the root cause of the Dutch ethical
disintegration at the Hemlock Society's Second National Voluntary
Euthanasia Conference. He showed that the Dutch doctors have thrown off
all pretense of being limited in any way and are now a completely
independent elite corps with literally unlimited power, unregulated by
the courts, the legislative system, or even a moral code;

Sorry my English is not good enough ... I am impotent,
English-impotent ... I studied that [Hippocratic] oath exactly. The
conclusion of my Hippocratic Oath study is: "A more bad
physician's oath doesn't exist!" One sentence of the
patient-hostile Hippocratic Oath is: "I will never give anyone a
deadly poison, not even at their request, nor will I give them any
advice as to a deadly poison." But it doesn't apply for the last
50 years. Today I judge such an oath to be an act of unmedical
patient-hostility, an act of inhumanity.[33]

The Magnitude of the Killing.

According to various Dutch sources, there are about 3,000 cases of
registered voluntary euthanasia in Holland annually. There are also at
least this many involuntary cases of euthanasia each year, and
some sources put the number as high as 15,000.[34]

On September 10, 1991, the Dutch government summarized the country's
euthanasia situation. Its two-volume report, entitled Medische
Beslissingen Rond Het Levenseinde, reported that 91% of all cases of
Dutch euthanasia violate the already-permissive limits set by Dutch
courts. Only 200 cases of euthanasia are performed within legal limits
annually, and the commission found that at least 2,400 illegal
mercy killings and assisted suicides happen each year. There are a total
of 6,000 legal and illegal mercy killings and assisted suicides in
Holland each year, which is equivalent to 4.7 percent of all deaths in
the country.

The report found that, when the more than 1,000 annual cases of involuntary
euthanasia are added to the total number of mercy killings, more than
23,000 patients had their lives "significantly shortened" by
overdoses of painkillers each year. Of these, 2,500 cases were done with
the specific goal of shortening or ending life.

Four out of every five Dutch general practitioners have performed
active euthanasia at some point in their careers. More than one-fourth
(28%) actively euthanize at least two of their patients each year, and
one of seven (14%) actively euthanize at least five of their patients
annually.[35] According to the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, at least
eight Dutch hospitals are performing widespread involuntary
euthanasia.[36]

Jack Kevorkian's system of "obitoriums" staffed by
professional "obitiatrists" is a reality in Holland.

In June of 1984, the Board of the 30,000 member Royal Dutch Society
of Medicine (KNMG, the Dutch equivalent of the American Medical
Association) approved a "Position on Euthanasia" paper that
supported the legalization of both voluntary and involuntary
active euthanasia ("mercy killing").

Three years later, the Committee on Medical Ethics of the European
Community unanimously rejected the Dutch medical society's radical
proposals on euthanasia with the statement that "We hope that this
strong reaction will induce our Dutch colleagues to reconsider their
move and return to the happy communion of utmost respect for human
life."[30]

This "strong reaction" was completely ignored by the Dutch
serial killer-'physicians.' In 1990, Dutch anesthesiologists refuse to
participate in surgery on Down Syndrome children; at least 300
handicapped newborns are starved to death each year; and cardiologists
flatly refuse to treat any person over the age of 75.

Involuntary euthanasia is routinely defended in the two major Dutch
medical journals. Newborns with Down Syndrome, duodenal atresia,
cerebral hemorrhage, and other major diseases and birth defects are
killed outright.

Almost the Final Chapter.

On February 9, 1993, the Dutch Parliament finally caved in. It could
not bear to put up with the continued divergence between national morals
and the law and legalized what was "happening anyway."
Apparently unaware of the ghastly irony of its actions, the Parliament
codified the Royal Dutch Medical Association's euthanasia guidelines as
an appendix to the Disposal of the Dead Act.

Maurice De Wachter, director of the Institute for Bioethics in
Maastricht, ominously said that "The Netherlands is what I would
like to call a test case for an experiment in medical ethics ... There
is a practice growing where doctors feel at ease with helping patients
to die, in other words killing them."[2]

The Future of Euthanasia in Holland.

The Dutch Health Council (Gezondheidsraad) is the official
medical society advising the Dutch government. This organization has
proposed a "Model Aid-in Dying Law" that would allow any child
of 6 or over to make a death request. According to this Model Law, if
the child's parents objected to the decision, the child could present
himself to a special aid-in-dying board for a final binding decision.
According to the Model Law, "Minors have the right to request
aid-in-dying whether or not their parents agree."[29]

Note that the child would not have to be terminally ill, or in fact,
ill at all a teenaged boy who is depressed over losing his girl or being
cut from the soccer team would no longer has to drown or shoot himself;
he could be executed "safely and legally" in a Dutch
euthanasia clinic under this proposal. A 13-year old girl who was
pregnant as a result of rape or incest and was depressed by her
situation could be put to sleep as well.

Reaction of the Americans.

The topic of runaway health care costs is becoming more and more
prominent in the United States. As may be expected, the more utilitarian
(or eugenicist) mindset naturally opts for the easy solution: Instead of
working to increase efficiency and cut waste, simply eliminate those who
are too costly to care for under the current system.

... a denial of nutrition may in the long run become the only
effective way to make certain that a large number of biologically
tenacious patients actually die. Given the increasingly large pool of
superannuated, chronically ill, physically marginal elderly, it could
well become the nontreatment of choice ... Our emerging problem is not
just that of eliminating useless or wasteful treatment, but of
limiting even efficacious treatment, because of its high cost. It may
well turn out that what is best for each and every individual is not
necessarily a societally affordable health care system.

Callahan and his peers advocate a "fixed categorical
standard" which would flatly deny each category of surgery past
certain ages, regardless of prognosis. As an example, coronary bypass
surgery would be banned after the age of 60. Naturally, those elderly
people who happen to have money could still buy any surgical procedure
they wanted if the price was right. This situation would thus become a
curious reflection of the Neofeminist complaint that, if abortion were
to become illegal again, only rich women could afford safe ones.

There is growing fear among medical professionals that programs such
as those in Holland will quickly become entrenched in United States
health care facilities. Dr. Charles L. Sprung warns in the April 25,
1990 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
that "Widespread practice of active euthanasia in the United States
appears not very far away."

However, others would welcome such 'advances' with open arms. Derek
Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, said of the euthanasia program
in Holland; "It's been tested there ... it appears to be
working."[37] Margaret Battin, another Hemlock officer, urged that
the United States adopt the Dutch euthanasia program; "Let's use
the Netherlands as a role model."[38]

And the Hemlock Quarterly reported that "The Netherlands
are closest to having achieved their goal of active voluntary
euthanasia."[39]

Such a model would certainly save money in the United States. It is
estimated that 20,000 persons are killed in Holland every year most of
them involuntarily (the 3,000 Dutch voluntary euthanasias are
strictly registered; the remainder are classified as involuntary).[40]

Holland has a population of about 15 million. If this figure were
ratioed up to the United States' current population of about 265
million, this would mean 360,000 murders by euthanasia every year in
this country one every twenty seconds during working days
equivalent to the total population reaching the age of 75 every year!

One incident in particular stands out in the push for euthanasia in
the United States, because it displays the same canny sense of timing
and exploitation of the news media displayed by the early pro-abortion
movement.

Janet Adkins, a 54-year old Portland, Oregon resident, was assisted
in her June 1990 suicide by a retired pathologist, Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

(1) to 'show' that laws banning doctor-assisted suicide were
'inhumane' and 'unenforceable' by pushing them to their limit, and

(2) to "rekindle the public debate on euthanasia" (what
this really meant is that the public was losing interest in the
euthanasia debate, and Adkin's death would lead to a new round of
talk-show appearances and debates by pro-euthanasia activists).

The push for euthanasia was lagging because its message was not being
widely accepted; suddenly the euthanasiasts tore a page from the pro-abortionists's
strategy book and began to emphasize "personal choice" at
every opportunity. This is the new approach to the media and the public.

The Victim's Background.

Janet Adkins was diagnosed in June of 1989 as having the very early
stages of Alzheimer's Disease. Physicians at the Oregon Health Sciences
University said that persons in such a situation live an average of ten
years after diagnosis. Adkins appeared to be perfectly healthy and
normal, and had even played tennis with her son the week before her
assisted suicide.

Adkins was a member of the Hemlock Society. So was her husband.

The Killer's Background.

25 years ago, Neoliberals laughed at pro-lifers who were fretting
over the gradual liberalization of abortion laws and who were predicting
the establishment chains of abortion clinics across the land. Now pro-euthanasiasts
are chuckling at the same people who are worried that euthanasia clinics
will soon sprout up all over the country.

This is despite the fact that several leading euthanasiasts have
advocated and even described such chains.

One of these is Jack "The Dripper" Kevorkian, the 62-year
old retired pathologist who likes to kill sick and depressed people.

Kevorkian, who had been in trouble for draining blood from dead
bodies and pumping it into living patients, has little use for any
limits on his activities, no matter what their source. He claimed that
death-row prisoners and others should be freely experimented on and says
that

The so-called Nuremberg Code and all its derivatives completely
ignores the extraordinary opportunities for terminal experimentation
on humans facing imminent and inevitable death. Intense emotionalism
engendered by the concentration camp atrocities of World War II has
unfairly stigmatized this honorable concept and cloaked it in
silence ...[13]

He revealed his hard-core anti-theistic beliefs (and his lack of
knowledge of current events) when he railed against the court system;

They are dictating how medicine should be practiced. You know the
court is dominated by religion ... 'Life is sanctity, this and that
...' The problem with medicine today is that it's under the Dark-Age
mentality of mystical religion, which has permeated medicine to the
core since Christianity took over.[13]

Kevorkian firmly roots his activities in the shifting and unchartable
sands of situational ethics;

The origin of the ethics, however, must come from the situation as
it exists. And the code must fit the situation. And the ethics must
change as the situation changes. That's the way to keep control. Not
by an inflexible maxim that applies for two thousand years, but an
ethical code that will change a decade later. It's ethical conduct
within the framework of time and space. Ethical codes should never be
set in stone. They can't be, they must change constantly ...[13]

Kevorkian has published a serious proposal to establish a chain of
euthanasia mills "obitoriums" where trained staffs of suicide
specialists ("obitiatrists") would help people commit
medically-assisted suicide, or "medicide" with the use of
killing machines he calls "mercitrons."[42] He has said
"Let me put together a small [euthanasia] team called the
Untouchables. I guarantee, under my supervision, it would be
incorruptible."[43]

Sure, Jack. Just like abortionists, right?

To be fair to Kevorkian, his ideas are positively tame when compared
to the wild dreams of other pro-euthanasia theorists, One of these is
American Council of Life Insurance speaker Ronna Klingenberg, who said
that by the year 2000 our country will have many "neomorts"
(which are people sustained in comatose conditions for the purpose of
organ harvesting) because we will have the right to sell our organs
after we die so that we may make money to enjoy our lives more now.
She also said that soon people will have the right to "choose
painless death with ample use of heroin and mind-control
techniques" and that travel agencies will offer "adventure
deaths." These would involve the person killing himself heroically
on an elaborately-staged set of his own choosing. Such scenarios would
be planned by "lifestyle engineers."[44]

Gun battle at the OK Corral, anyone?

But back to Jack. Kevorkian had advertised in the March 18, 1990 Detroit
Free Press; "Applications are being accepted. Oppressed by a
fatal disease, a severe handicap, a crippling deformity? Show him the
proper compelling medical evidence that you should die and Dr. Jack
Kevorkian will help you kill yourself free of charge."

Interestingly, Kevorkian's business card reads:

Jack Kevorkian, M.D.
Bioethics and Obitiatry
Special death counseling
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

Kevorkian describes himself as an "obitiatrist" ('death
doctor'), and has advocated everything from involuntary medical
experimentation on death-row inmates to chains of non-profit suicide
clinics.

His motto is "A rational policy of planned death."[43]

His reason for this policy is quite simple:

Allowing someone to
starve to death and to die of thirst, the way we do now, is barbaric.
Our Supreme Court has validated barbarism. The Nazis did that in
concentration camps ... It took her [Nancy Cruzan] a week to die. Try
it! You think that just because you're in a coma you don't
suffer?[45]

After the Adkins debacle, Kevorkian lost his license when the
Michigan Board of Medicine voted 8-0 to suspend it. However, he vowed to
keep killing people despite this loss.

He was true to his word. The following year, he assisted in the
suicides of two non-terminal patients, Sherry Miller, 43, who was
suffering from multiple sclerosis, and Marjorie Wantz, 58, who was
afflicted with pelvic disease.[46]

After Kevorkian killed Susan Williams on May 15, 1992, Hemlock of
Michigan president Janet Good announced that "Hemlock has prospered
and grown because of him."[47] And commentator Harry Schwartz dared
to characterized Kevorkian's work as "saintly," and compared
him to Mother Teresa, neglecting to mention that the latter saves lives
while the former ends them.[48]

In addition to these four assisted suicides, Kevorkian also advised a
cancer-stricken Los Angeles dentist by phone how to rig a machine that
would deliver sodium pentothal and potassium chloride into his veins.
Dr. Gary Sloan took 20 minutes to die in July 1990 14 minutes longer
than Kevorkian said it would.[49] By March of 1993, he had run his tally
up to 15 assisted suicides.

Kevorkian is obviously following his credo, which will tolerate
absolutely no interference from any source: "Medicine should be absolutely
separate from the law, politics, religion, and the
judiciary."[46]

Kevorkian is also a member of the Hemlock Society.

The Quality of Life "Minister."

Before her "assisted
suicide" in June of 1990, Adkins met with her minister, Alan Deale,
of the First Unitarian Church in Portland, who stated that "We
support the freedom of choice. Life only has dignity if it has some
quality." Deale admitted that he knew about Adkin's plans and
approved of them.[43]

The First Unitarian Church, a "New Age" organization, has
aggressively supported Portland abortion clinics and has taken a very
strong position in favor of euthanasia.

In other words, Adkins, Kevorkian, and Deale were all made for each
other. They were the key actors in what appeared to be a
carefully-planned and successful public relations stunt.

And so, in support of this "stunt," Adkins died a
singularly lonely and undignified death in the back of Kevorkian's
battered and rusted 1968 Volkswagen van.

But she achieved the Hemlock Society's objective of restarting the
euthanasia debate yet again, just as Sherrie Finkbine did 25 years ago
for the abortion debate.

Lessons Learned.

The primary lesson to be learned from this case is
quite simple.

In their literature and debates, the Hemlock Society and other
euthanasiasts have been claiming all along that they wanted only to
relieve the pain of those people who were suffering from incurable
diseases in their very last stages.

Remember that Kevorkian, in his Detroit Free Press
advertisement (shown above), had called for people "Oppressed by a
fatal disease, a severe handicap, a crippling deformity," and with
"proper compelling medical evidence" to show that they should
be assisted in their deaths.

Here we go again.

One suspects that "proper compelling medical evidence" is
of the same class as women must present today to obtain an abortion.

Janet Adkins certainly did not qualify under any of these
criteria, yet Hemlock member Kevorkian helped her kill herself anyway.
This lays bare the true goals of the Hemlock Society and shows beyond
any reasonable doubt that euthanasia limits, once set, are always
expanded by the anti-lifers.

The true objective of the euthanasiasts is: To allow people to kill
themselves (or be killed) at any time whatsoever, based solely
upon their own assessment of the elusive "quality of life."

Even this will eventually be expanded to having people killed
involuntarily because others judge their "quality of
life" to be substandard.

1990: The Pivotal Nancy Cruzan Case.

The Beginning of the End.

1990 was a very good year for the
euthanasia movement. First, they established an assisted-suicide
precedent with Janet Adkins, as described above. And then they finally
managed to dispose of Nancy Cruzan amid the predictable flurry of
publicity and propaganda.

On January 11, 1982, 25-year old Nancy Cruzan was driving alone on an
icy road, lost control of her vehicle, and was seriously injured in the
resulting accident. She never regained consciousness and became one of
the approximately 10,000 Americans living in a persistent comatose
state.

Contrary to persistent media lies, she was not in a
"persistent vegetative state;" her medical status was
"severely handicapped." She required no life support machinery
other than a feeding tube implanted in her stomach in early 1982.

The Process of Dehumanization.

Nancy Cruzan was now an inconvenience
to many people; the cost-conscious health care system, the State, and in
particular her parents, Joe and Joyce Cruzan.

But she was the opportunity of a lifetime for pro-euthanasiasts.

In order to kill Cruzan, it was necessary to first dehumanize her, a
task willingly and expertly taken up by Dr. Fred Plum, Chief of
Neurology at the Cornell New York Hospital.

During testimony, he referred to her as a mere "collection of
organs" and an "artifact of technological medicine."[50]

In an interview with Nat Hentoff, Dr. Ronald Granford claimed that
she was "the moral equivalent of a biopsy from Nat Hentoff's
arm," and asserted that her "legal personhood" should be
revoked so the could be disposed of or experimented upon without the
bother of having to go to court.[50]

Just as the unborn are being referred to as "pre-human,"
those in a coma are now commonly referred to by physicians as
"post-human."

And the euthanasia doctors are not the only ones who are 'preparing
the ground;' the National Abortion Rights Action League was obviously
looking ahead when it claimed that "Abortion and euthanasia are
separate issues (though determining the end of the human person is as
difficult a question as determining the start); we set speed limits at
60 MPH and do not necessarily move them to 70 MPH (one step does not
necessarily lead to another)."[51]

The Legal Process.

Nancy's parents petitioned a lower court to order
the Missouri Rehabilitation Center at Mount Vernon to allow their
daughter to die. This court granted the petition, but the Missouri
Supreme Court overturned the lower court decision, and, on appeal, the
case Cruzan v. Director of Missouri Department of Health became
the first to directly address the question of euthanasia at the United
States Supreme Court level.

In a victory for life, the United States Supreme Court narrowly
averted making this case the euthanasiast's Roe v. Wade by
denying that the so-called "right to die" is unfettered and
absolute. The justices ruled that the States may require "clear and
convincing" evidence that a comatose person actually wished to die
before they lost their ability to decide their fates for themselves.

The Court essentially held that the States do not have to buckle
under to family member's demands when a patient's wishes cannot be
concretely proven.

However, the ruling indicated that there is a Constitutional right to
refuse tube feeding and other life-sustaining measures when patients
make their wishes clearly known before they become incompetent.

The Final Tragic Act of the Drama.

So a determined Joe and Joyce
Cruzan trudged back to the Missouri courts, and rounded up a string of
Nancy's co-workers who were willing to testify that she would never want
to live "like a vegetable." Nobody bothered to explain how her
co-workers could all remember such a statement so clearly after more
than eight years or why a perfectly healthy 25-year old Nancy Cruzan
would even make such statements before her car accident.

Nancy did not enjoy any kind of representation in the State court;
nobody testified for her, because all of those who wanted her to live
were ruled automatic non-parties to the litigation by the judge. The
outcome of the one-sided hearing was a foregone conclusion.

So Nancy was sentenced to death. Her feeding tube was removed on
December 14, 1990 at the Missouri Rehabilitation Center in Mount Vernon,
Missouri.

In a chilling portent of the future, the first rescue mission staged
to save a born person from death occurred on Tuesday, December
18, 1990. 19 persons were arrested as they tried to reach Nancy's
hospital room. They were charged with the same offenses they had
previously encountered at abortion mills; criminal trespass and unlawful
assembly.[52]

Scores of armed police officers patrolled the halls of the Missouri
Rehabilitation Center (George Orwell would be proud of this name!) until
she finally died of starvation and thirst the day after Christmas 1990.

Doron Webster of the New York chapter of the Society for the Right to
Die stated ominously that "We feel that Nancy Cruzan has made legal
history."[52]

[3] Leo Alexander, M.D. "Medical Science Under
Dictatorship." The New England Journal of Medicine, July 14,
1949, pages 39 to 47. This superbly-written summary of the medical
horrors inflicted by Nazi 'doctors' on their victims is available as
Reprint #605 from the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences
(The Hastings Institute), Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, 10706. Also
quoted by Nat Hentoff in "The 'Small Beginnings' of Death." Human
Life Review, Spring 1988.

[5] San Diego University Professor Ron Westover in a letter to the Los
Angeles Times. Described in the July 1985 American Spectator.

[6] B.D. Colen. "Doctors Decide on Life Support End." The
Washington Post, March 10, 1974. Discussion of an incident where
physicians at the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medicine turned off
the respirator of a man without his consent or the consent of his
family. Also see "Doctors Ponder Ethics of Letting Mongoloid
Die." The Washington Post, October 15, 1971.

[7] Allen Chase. The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the
New Scientific Racism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Pages
69, 103, 349, and 635.

[8] Father James Tunstead Burtchaell. "The Holocaust and
Abortion." Supplement to the newsletter of the Catholic League for
Religious and Civil Rights, volume 9, no. 11.

[9] Robert H. Williams, M.D., Professor of Endocrinology at the
University of Washington School of Medicine. "Numbers, Types and
Duration of Human Lives." Northwest Medicine, July 1970.
Page 493.

[20] Dutch physician Pieter Admiraal, at the 8th biennial conference
of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, held in Maastricht,
Holland, on June 7-10 1990. Quoted in Rita L. Marker, "I Only Kill
My Friends." 30 Days, September-October 1990. Page 34.

[32] "Where Euthanasia is a Way of Death." Medical
Economics, November 23, 1987. Page 23.

[33] From the transcript of a speech by Dr. Julius Hackethal entitled
"Medical Help By Suicide As a Method of Voluntary Euthanasia,"
presented at the Second National Voluntary Euthanasia Conference of the
Hemlock Society on February 9th, 1985, in Los Angeles, California.

[34] Eileen Brown, R.N. "Then and Now: Euthanasia in Germany,
Holland, and America." Human Life of Washington Newsletter on
Initiative 119, Summer 1990. Also see the Bernadell Technical
Bulletin of January 1990.

[35] I. van der Sluis, M.D. "The Practice of Euthanasia in the
Netherlands." Living World (publication of International
Life Services, Inc.). Volume 5, Number 2, pages 18-21.

[39] Derek Humphry, founder and President of the Hemlock Society, on
"Face the Nation," September 2, 1985.

[40] Margaret P. Battin, "The Art of Dying in the United States
and Holland," presentation given at the Hemlock Conference in
Chicago, Illinois, on May 20, 1989. Also see "Report on the World
Conference of Right-to-Die Societies," Hemlock Quarterly,
April 1987. Page 3.

Catholic Health Association. A Time To Be Old, a Time to Flourish:
The Special Needs of the Elderly At-Risk. Report of the Catholic
Health Association's Task Force on Long-Term Health Care. 1988, 109
pages. Order from the Catholic Health Association, 4455 Woodson Road,
St. Louis, Missouri 63134. Telephone: (314) 427-2500.

Hugh Gregory Gallagher. By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians,
and the License to Kill in the Third Reich. Henry Holt and Company,
115 West 18th Street, New York, New York 10011. 1990, 335 pages. The
details on Nazi Germany's "Aktion T-4" program and the
disturbing parallels to today's treatment of the weak and disabled.

Carlos F. Gomez, M.D. Regulating Death: Euthanasia and the Case of
the Netherlands. Free Press, 866 Third Avenue, New York, New York
10022. 1991, 170 pages. The ethics and history of euthanasia in Holland;
the role of the courts; euthanasia from theory to practice; and the
unavoidable dangers of regulating death.

Father Paul Marx, OSB. And Now ... Euthanasia (second revised
edition). Human Life International, 7845-E Airpark Road, Gaithersburg,
Maryland 20879. Telephone: (301) 670-7884. 1985, 106 pages. This little
book, directed at the general reader, offers an up-to-date assessment of
the euthanasia situation in the United States and other countries. The
basic history of euthanasia, the tactics of the pro-killing people, and
the role of the courts are examined. Essential basic reading for the
beginning anti-euthanasia activist.

United States Government. Institutional Protocols for Decisions
About Life-Sustaining Treatments. Focuses on formal policies and
guidelines through which hospitals and nursing homes specify
decisionmaking procedures regarding treatment for adult patients with
life-threatening conditions. Serial Number 052-003-01123-9, 1988, 89
pages. Order by mail from Superintendent of Documents, United States
Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402, or by telephone from
(202) 783-3238.

Wolf Wolfenberger. The New Genocide of Handicapped and Afflicted
People. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Training Institute.
1987, 114 pages. Reviewed by Julie Grimstad on page 46 of the May 1990 ALL
About Issues. This little volume deals with the progressive
expansion of "deathmaking" and its ties to the anti-life
mentality.